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"Adviser to National Children’s Study Quits"

"An environmental scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has resigned from the expert advisory committee intended to guide the US National Children’s Study (NCS), charging that the goals of the massive study, which aims to track factors affecting the health of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21, have been 'significantly abrogated' by its managers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."

"In an e-mail this morning to study director Steven Hirschfeld, Ellen Silbergeld said that the study’s just-announced change away from representative sampling of 100,000 US children means that it “will no longer provide representative information of value to practitioners, researchers and the public.”

Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences with joint appointments in epidemiology and in health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, added that the shift away from population-based sampling that delivers generalizable results “is a great disappointment and places the US study in a poor light in comparison to other national and international projects”. "